Shirtless Agent In Bottomless Scandal

Amy Davidson (New Yorker) has created the perfect title for her story and got hold of the photo to prove her point. What we know is that a movie will be made about the fall of Patreaus because the story and cast of characters is too good.

Davidson: The Petraeus scandal has become the sort of story in which knowing that an F.B.I. agent in his forties e-mailed a shirtless photograph of himself and two bullet-riddled, also shirtless mannequins to a couple of dozen people, rather than to one woman, makes you think better of him. Conspiracy theorists have been drawn to this one since the beginning—how could they not be, when the head of the Central Intelligence Agency resigns because of an affair. But at this point, it might be more helpful to consult a string theorist: the latest round of revelations have been, above all, a reminder that the world, even in its non-tabloided state, can be a very strange place—one in which the original plan for this past weekend, as Barton Gellman of Time reported, was for David Petraeus to go on a birthday bike ride with Lance Armstrong.
One can somehow picture Petraeus and Armstrong pedalling by in the background of the picture, released by the Seattle Times, of Special Agent Frederick Humphries II sitting on a shooting range with his two fake friends. The paper had the picture because Humphries had sent it to one of its reporters before the Petraeus story even broke, along with the account of how he’d shot a deranged man with a knife (long story). In other words, what the F.B.I., knowing only that he had sent the photograph to Jill Kelley—whose e-mail the F.B.I was looking at at Humphries’s suggestion—was worried was a sign of obsession was instead simply an instance of exculpatory oddness. Humphries’s wife has a print of the photograph, framed, hanging on her wall. It can be added to the gallery of this scandal, next to the picture of Kelley in a shiny turquoise dress smiling with Marco Rubio at a fundraiser, which another attendee tweeted out Thursday. Apparently, she and her twin, Natalie, crashed the event, got their picture taken, and then left without donating a dime. That almost makes one like the sisters better.
And Humphries may not be the character his shirtlessness led one to expect. He served at Guantanamo Bay, and was involved in arresting Ahmed Ressam, so-called millennium bomber. Afterward, according to the Seattle Times, he agreed to testify “about Ressam’s harsh treatment by the agent’s colleagues after the 9/11 attacks.” Jill Kelley’s status as an honorary consul of the Republic of Korea, or the news that she persuaded someone to let her take part in a parachute jump with special-operations trainers, is not half so interesting.
The parachuting might explain why Broadwell called the e-mail account she set up “KelleyPatrol”—perhaps she felt the same mystification about the number of Jill sightings that the rest of us have been feeling. KelleyPatrol wrote warnings to Kelley, as well as one General John Allen, who promptly forwarded it to Kelley—thus accounting for at least a few of the thousands of pages of e-mails and other missives that Allen is said to have sent her way. (Their character is in dispute: Allen’s allies say they were flirtatious but innocent, in a Southern sort of way; but the Times quoted a law-enforcement official who said that they were more explicit than that.) One KelleyPatrol note, according to the Washington Post, mentioned that both Kelley and Allen would be at a particular embassy party; another, a particular event Petraeus was supposed to attend. “Clearly the person knew the comings and goings of General Allen and CIA Director Petraeus,” a source told the paper. “There was concern that someone was stalking them electronically or physically and knew the comings and goings of fairly important people.”
How important is knowing Petraeus’s schedule now? On Friday, he will testify in a closed session about Benghazi—a very different moment than the one expected a week ago. The C.I.A. has begun an investigation of its now former director; the Pentagon has started one, too, of its generals’ behavior. One pity in this is that a truly serious biography of Petraeus—unlike the one that Broadwell wrote, with all its wasted access—might make for good reading. There has at least been a less fogged-up view of his comings and goings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what he left behind. To the collection of snapshots from the scandal, one can add the photographs that Broadwell put in a blog post last year of a razed Afghan village—an operation she praised to the point of bragging. (Joshua Foust has more on that story, which is now getting another look.) Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that he didn’t expect any more of them to join the ensemble in this particular scandal, which is fine: we’ve got enough characters to keep straight.
What will seem more absurd when we have some perspective on this chapter? That Humphries’s aesthetic sense owes a little too much to early-eighties pop, or that David Petraeus was regarded as a military savior, and Broadwell as a serious scholar of counterinsurgency? Gellman’s Time story recounting Broadwell’s attempt to line up Armstrong for Petraeus’s birthday also describes her telling fellow-participants at an Aspen Institute conference that she’d been approached about running for the Senate in North Carolina; Petraeus, she said, had talked her out of it. If that sounds close to a fantasy, so does her flying around Afghanistan with the general, and that happened. And Broadwell for Senate would be quite a campaign to imagine: start with the fundraiser, with Lance at the buffet, and Jill and Natalie, having showed up without an invitation, rushing over for a photo with Paula. Would she have grabbed a mannequin to stand in for her while she found a computer to activate the KelleyPatrol? Or would the three of them have just put their arms around each other’s shoulders, looked at the camera, and smiled?

Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his “poor judgment,” but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power.

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